the87press & Housmans Bookshop present: Hummingbirds 7.0, a literary salon

Join the87press for a very special Hummingbirds event featuring Alia Al Ghussain and Rayya El Zein to celebrate the launch of Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic (Indiana University Press, 2025).

Based on ethnographic research in Ramallah (Palestine), Amman (Jordan), and Beirut (Lebanon), Filling the Head reveals how youths in these cities have maneuvered the challenges of making music while also navigating shifting geopolitical landscapes. Through these everyday experiences of being moved by music or ideas, Rayya El Zein explores how ordinary patterns of motion and emotion provide a space for political engagement when spectacular political movements like protests, strikes, or revolutions feel far away, forced, or otherwise impossible. In contrast to existing narratives that equate rap with popular political resistance against oppressive regimes, she argues instead for affective engagement through istifzaz―provocation or surprise―as well as yearning. Within this avant-garde genre, there is no design to reach the masses with a political message; in fact, as El Zein demonstrates, the refusal of artists to confine their lyrical or musical experimentation to an ethos of resistance creates an aesthetic whose lack of singular politics defines it.

Hummingbirds is a literary salon curated by the87press aiming to hold space for authors and interlocutors to have conversations about recently published work. This iteration charts a new thread in that conversation which aims to bring academic publishing to a community audience.

Host: Azad Ashim Sharma, Founding Director of the87press.

Interlocutor: Alia Al Ghussain

Author: Rayya El Zein

Free with Registration

Doors at 7pm for a 7:30pm start.

The event will be structured around a live reading from the book by Rayya and a conversation with audience participation encouraged.

Rayya El Zein is an independent writer and researcher. A Palestinian and Lebanese American mother and daughter, her recent writing explores return, yearning, and other frameworks of belonging and becoming. In Filling the Head, she listens to the experiences of rappers and their audiences in three Arab cities as they search for ways to engage the political beyond the framework of resistance. She holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read more about her work at www.rayyaelzein.com

Alia Al Ghussain is a British-Palestinian organiser and activist engaged in human rights research that focuses on Big Tech accountability. She is currently the Chair of War on Want.